The International Center for Equity in Health (ICEH) has released a new R package, ICEHmeasures, now available on the official repository (CRAN - Comprehensive R Archive Network). The package provides tools to calculate key measures of inequality and to generate the widely used equiplot, an intuitive dot-plot visualization designed to display absolute inequalities across population groups.

ICEHmeasures implements three complex inequality measures commonly used in epidemiology and public health research:

• Slope Index of Inequality (SII) – a regression-based measure that quantifies the absolute difference in an outcome between the most and least advantaged groups.
• Concentration Index (CIX) – a measure that captures the extent to which a health variable is concentrated across socioeconomic groups.
• Mean Absolute Difference to the Mean (MAD) – a summary measure that reflects the level of inequality across population subgroups.

 

The equiplot is a distinctive dot-plot graph that allows inequalities to be easily visualized across equity dimensions represented by the dots, such as income, education levels, geographic regions, or demographic characteristics. It can be used to compare inequality across countries, time periods within the same country, settings, or indicators. Equiplots have become a widely recognized tool for communicating inequality patterns in health and development indicators.

The ICEHmeasures package expands the analytical tools developed by the ICEH to the R ecosystem. The equiplot was previously made available through commands for Stata developed by the ICEH, and the new package now allows R users to easily calculate inequality measures and produce visualizations.

The package is intended for researchers, public health analysts, data scientists, and policymakers working in health and social inequality, facilitating the analysis and clear communication of disparities across population groups.

A video tutorial demonstrating how to use each function in the package will be released soon, providing step-by-step guidance for calculating the inequality measures and generating equiplots.

ICEHmeasures was developed by ICEH researchers Leonardo Ferreira and Luisa Arroyave. The package can be installed directly from CRAN using the command:

install.packages(“ICEHmeasures”)

More details are available on the official page.